I've always been scared of advertising folk. I've met them at parties and I've been to their offices and I've always found them intimidatingly cool. At one company I visited they held their meetings in a caravan that had somehow been installed in the place a rather more exotic place to gather than the typical BBC glass box.

Rather be dead than cool.

So the thing I realized rather gradually - I must say starting about 20 years ago now that we know about computers and things - there's a possibility of a more general basis for rules to describe nature.

Computers rather frighten me because I never did learn to type so the whole thing seems extraordinarily complicated to me.

There is a real danger that computers will develop intelligence and take over. We urgently need to develop direct connections to the brain so that computers can add to human intelligence rather than be in opposition.

In the practical world of computing it is rather uncommon that a program once it performs correctly and satisfactorily remains unchanged forever.

Personally I rather look forward to a computer program winning the world chess championship. Humanity needs a lesson in humility.

Ideology and communication more often than not run into each other rather than complement each other. Principle and communication work together. Ideology and communication often work apart.

What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History more often than not shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed sooner rather than later.

A leopard does not change his spots or change his feeling that spots are rather a credit.

We have no reason to think that climate change is harmful if you look at the world as a whole. Most places in fact are better off being warmer than being colder. And historically the really bad times for the environment and for people have been the cold periods rather than the warm periods.

I believe we should reframe our response to climate change as an imperative for growth rather than merely being a way of being green or meeting environmental commitments.

Rather than saying 'My checking account is a wreck ' change it to 'I will learn how to track my spending and balance my checkbook.'

I think most artists would be happy to have bigger audiences rather than smaller ones. It doesn't mean that they are going to change their work in order necessarily to get it but they're happy if they do get it.

We have got to change our ethics and our financial system and our whole way of understanding the world. It has to be a world in which people live rather than die a sustainable world. It could be great.

I don't like definitions but if there is a definition of freedom it would be when you have control over your reality to transform it to change it rather than having it imposed upon you. You can't really ask for more than.

We have domesticated God's transcendence. We often learn about God at about the same time as we are learning about Santa Claus but our ideas about Santa Claus change mature and become more nuanced whereas our ideas of God can remain at a rather infantile level.